


Remember Me

by theLiterator



Series: Cisco/Wells not-quite-AU [3]
Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Angst, Apologies, Gen, M/M, Past Abuse, Past Domestic Violence, Past Relationship(s), Stalking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-12
Updated: 2015-11-12
Packaged: 2018-05-01 06:45:25
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5196128
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theLiterator/pseuds/theLiterator
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Every mistake he has never made is pressing down on him and he would do anything to change that.</p><p>(Or: Earth-2 Wells is a creepy stalker.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Remember Me

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers through Flash S02 E06.

"You can barely look me in the eye," Harrison snarled, utterly _sick_ of being found guilty by proxy to a dead man, especially by some... some _child_. He grabbed the nearest solid object and slammed it down in front of Cisco, _demanding_ his attention, _seizing_ it, since Cisco wouldn't give it freely. "Why is that? What did he do to you?"

He didn't even register how close he was to yelling until Cisco blanched white and fled the room.

Harrison heaved out a sigh and set the clamp he'd grabbed aside, already regretting his outburst. Here, in unfriendly territory, he couldn't afford to lose control and alienate these people further. They were his only chance.

He asked Detective West, next, and was unsurprised by the suspicious glares he got for the line of inquiry, but he was equally undeterred.

"I obviously cannot hope to work with him when he _cowers_ in my presence and refuses to listen to me!" Harrison snapped.

"Look," West said. "I get that you're supposedly a good guy now, and I even understand that the other guy wasn't actually, you know, this universe's you. But Cisco's got some stuff he's working through, and if he doesn't want to work with you, you're just going to have to live with it."

Except Dr. Harrison Wells had yet to meet a mystery he could 'live with' not solving, so he found an alternative means to do so.

He was a theoretical physicist. He was very good at problem solving.

The facial recognition software they were using to try to find Dr. Light had extensive logs that were sourced out to an unknown location, but the raw data of the security footage at STAR Labs did _not_ , so he set to finding every interaction Cisco Ramon had had with the Dr. Wells of this Earth.

By hand.

At night.

Well, it wasn't as though he were capable of relaxing enough to _sleep_ anyway.

And _then_ , idiotic as this universe was making him, he almost _missed_ the vital information.

The scene he had almost ignored seemed-- typical. Not that Harrison truly knew what typical was for these people, but Cisco was standing at a worktable in some cluttered room of the facility, soldering iron in one hand, the other flapping around in his typically expressive fashion, and Dr. Wells-- the _other_ Dr. Wells-- was watching him work with fondness on his face.

He would have moved on, except--

A blond man was chained to a chair just at the edge of the camera frame, and, on seeing that, he saw--

Cisco's bare feet. A solid metal cuff that had been around one ankle long enough to start chafing.

The possessive hand that Dr. Wells had draped over Cisco's neck.

He watched through the footage carefully then, as Dr. Wells (and he _had_ to find a new name for the other; no wonder Cisco preferred the grating nickname of Harry.) kissed Cisco until he was crying, then toppled him to a mattress and stripped off his clothes and--

Harrison closed the window with prejudice and stood up, suddenly unable to... to _bear_ the weight of this other man's crimes.

 _Haven't I destroyed enough with my own two hands?_ he wondered. Surely, surely there must be a universe where he and Tess and Jesse lived _normal_ lives, free of tragedy and evil... surely...

But _those_ thoughts were unproductive, and Barry Allen still thought he could fight Dr. Light without hurting her.

The security footage nagged at him, though, and he turned back to it eventually, sifting through it with the sort of horrid fascination that one normally reserved for news reports of earthquakes and hurricanes.

He found himself growing more disgusted with _Detective_ West and Dr. Snow, for allowing that sort of thing to continue right under their noses.

How many little snatches of conversation that had ended with Cisco cowed and pale and not at all his normal, vibrant self just as one of the other STAR Labs employees rounded the corner? How often did the _other_ Wells lay a possessive hand on Cisco when he was showing off some silly gadget?

How _blind_ were these fools from this forsaken hole of a universe?

Harrison shoved his hands through his hair and closed the footage again, this time with no intention of pulling it back up. His near-perfect recall would suffice, should he decide to say something about this.

And that awoke a feeling of self-loathing that he'd thought himself well quit of once he'd decided how he was going to save Jesse, and he wasn't quite sure what to do with it.

When he'd felt the black quicksand of guilt engulfing him again once _she'd_ disappeared, he'd groped around for a way to ameliorate it, then acted on the bare shreds of his plans, and he'd... been able to push the emotion back, to _function._

But there was absolutely nothing he could do to earn the forgiveness of Cisco Ramon for crimes he hadn't committed, and the desire to do so was utterly infantile.

"Oh!" Caitlin said, when he walked into the cortex a few moments later. He tried to school his expression to one slightly less charged with murderous intent, but the attempt was a vain one, if her startlement and slight fear were any indication.

"Dr. Snow," he said. "Just the woman I was looking for."

"Me?" she asked. "I mean, how can I help, Dr. Wells?"

"Cisco Ramon," he said. 

She bit her lip and shook her head. "Joe said you'd been asking, and I'm not going to share his secrets. You'll have to ask him."

"Oh, that? No, I'm not concerned about some alternate version of myself keeping him chained in the basement like an animal. That's not why I'm here," he said.

She shook her head and took a step back.

Not for the first time, Harrison wished that he commanded half as much respect and fear from his own actions as this universe's Dr. Wells had from his. 

It would certainly have been a refreshing change.

"Does he have family? Friends, apart from the obvious?"

Caitlin shook her head. "Not really. I mean, he was getting to be friends with Leonard Snart, but then there was the kidnapping, so-- no."

Harrison shut his eyes and rubbed his forehead and repeated a mantra for patience.

"His parents?"

"Oh!" Caitlin exclaimed. "I mean, he has them, but they don't... they aren't very kind." She frowned.

Harrison tried to smile encouragingly at her, but then Cisco burst in, chattering a mile a minute about some alert on his phone, and Harrison knew the second he'd been spotted because the stream of brilliant, intuitive monologue stuttered to a nervous halt.

"Well," Harrison said to the room at large. "I've got business to attend to."

He left, and Cisco said, loudly enough that he meant to be overheard. "What the hell was _that_ about?"

But Harrison had leads. He had the barest shreds of a plan. And then Cisco would forgive him (as Jesse _must_ ).

***

The Ramon family home was a nice little house in an older Central City suburb, colorful with a flower garden and a brightly painted porch.

The Ramon family home made Harrison feel guiltier than the damned footage had, because as soon as he'd charmed his way inside -- "My name is Dr. Leicester, and I'm doing a background investigation on a potential hire," -- he could see _why_ his counterpart had targeted Cisco.

The woman wouldn't talk about Cisco. She was happy to wax poetic about the older son, Dante, and there were pictures and awards and trophies for all sorts of musical contests and competitions, but any attempt to redirect the conversation was thwarted almost immediately.

And where was the picture of Cisco winning the statewide science fair at 12? Harrison thought, finding a picture of Dante at about the same age, shaking the hand of some man in a suit in front of a piano. Cisco had definitely done so; Harrison had memorized what information on Cisco he could find.

And where Dante's high school graduation was splashed in blatant pride all across the mantle, there was no evidence of Cisco's graduation, summa cum laude, from Worchester Polytechnical Institute.

"You realize," Harrison said, whirling on the mother, whose name he had already forgotten as unimportant. "That I'm asking about _Cisco_ Ramon? I'm on the fence about hiring him, due to his association with STAR Labs and the incident with the particle accelerator and last year's singularity event."

"Well," the woman huffed. "If you insist."

"Tell me about him," Harrison demanded.

"He is a good son," she replied dutifully. "He sometimes forgot to make his bed, always playing with his little toys and computers and things. Always distracted. Nothing like my Dante; he could forever focus on the music." She smiled. "Like an angel on earth."

Harrison slapped his hands on his thighs.

"Well, thank you," he said cursorily. "That will be all."

***

As a contrast, Cisco's apartment was a rundown 5th floor walkup in a crime-ridden part of the city, with a deadbolt on the door so Harrison had to break in through a window.

Crime was becoming steadily less uncomfortable for him to commit, he thought uneasily.

There weren't _any_ pictures, here, and there wasn't food in the fridge. The dishes were all clean and in the cabinets, but none of them matched.

The bedroom was tidy, all the clothes in a hamper, the bed hap-hazardly made up, and Harrison sat down on it, trying to think past his mounting exhaustion.

Did Cisco spend most of his time at STAR Labs because his apartment was awful, or was his apartment awful because he spent most of his time elsewhere?

There was no real way to know, Harrison thought, so he left, moving on to the last place he'd ever wanted to go.

Dr. Wells’s home.

***

The house was an unfamiliar post-modern monstrosity, and Harrison was somehow no longer surprised by this sort of difference. Tess would never have let him have it built, and the interior was just as stark and bare; Jesse would have moved out if he'd tried to do that in his _own_ home.

Still, he had a mission, and it bore fruit almost immediately.

There _were_ photographs of Cisco in existence, he thought, staring at the array of 4x6es in their minimalist black frame. He was happy, it seemed, smiling at the camera with Dr. Snow and a few other people that Harrison didn't recognize-- except that was Hartley Rathaway glaring at Cisco in the snapshot with the sno-cones, and standing, unsmiling, next to Harrison in a few others.

There were other things, too; clothing taking up half the dresser, a laptop that had clearly been rebuilt several times and had coffee rings on the wrist-rest, a ratty and well-loved teddy bear.

Harrison thought about that lonely walk-up and realized that until Dr. Wells had _died_ , Cisco had probably spent most of his free time here, in this impersonal wasteland of a house.

Harrison sighed.

And then, he found a crate, and started packing things up. It was hard, because he knew his _own_ tastes, but they did not line up with this world's Wells's, and some things it was impossible to tell to whom they belonged, but he did his best, because there was absolutely no reason for Cisco to live without his own possessions just because Wells had used him and tortured him and left him without any sort of support network--

Not that Harrison had any experience with that of course.

(He would give _anything_ for a picture of Jesse, but there was no going home until his mission was finished, and imperfect memory would have to do.)

***

He left the crate in Cisco's workshop, a silent admission of that black, all-consuming guilt, and went to set up in one of the empty ones far away from Cisco's domain.


End file.
